MH-279 Pregnant - Life Hard : I TryPregnant’s first Mush release, Life Hard : I Try, consists of fourteen stuttery pop songs encompassing beautiful instrumentation, glitchy beats, and the unique voice of singer-songwriter-producer Daniel Trudeau. Written and recorded during a time of impending fatherhood and the start of his family, the album radiates opposing emotions. Songs feel heartwarming yet drip in a sense of isolation, as the artist's Neil Young-esque voice and storytelling are counterbalanced with experimental production and glitch-pop beats. Living life in the remote Sierra Nevada Foothills of Northern California makes a mark on every aspect of the music, art, and direction of the album and permeates the eclectic Pregnant sound. Local musician Raleigh Moncrief lent his hand to the recording process, and a number of other Northern California artists and musicians including Zac Nelson, Art Echternacht and Zack Pangborn contributed music or provided art for the release. A devastatingly personal album, Life Hard : I Try is inventive, addictive, and completely refuses to be pinned down by genre.

This, my friends, is a work of art - Exclaim / Pregnant‘s subtly constructed wonder-pop is a sign of the conflation of the old and the new that you’d expect to have happened sooner - A New Band A Day / Feels organic while being fiercely futuristic. - Crack In The Road / Glitched-out electro-pop that mutates elements of The Residents and Animal Collective. - Positive Destruction

Pregnant‘s bio for his Life Hard: I Try (Mush) album says the music was “written and recorded during a time of impending fatherhood and the start of his family”, which almost sounds like he was the one giving birth. Of course this cannot be true, as Daniel Trudeau is not Billy Crystalfrom the movie Rabbit Test, but what you do hear is music of discovery, wonderment, and inner beauty meant to be a mirror of the world viewed by someone about to go through some changes. The album is a mixture of vocalized treasures and instrumental ditties, and they could be anything from folk tales made by cooler-than-folk people or electronic sounds without Moby‘s assumed egos. It sounds homemade and highly concentrated like a can of soup, but within this can is a nice assortment of ingredients that might make you say “if I created electronic soundscapes, this is what I’d like for my mind to sound like while open.” It’s quirky at times, there are moments where you wonder if the sound of amplified water drips mixing up with angelic harps should make people create figure 8′s with their hips.

By calling himself Pregnant, does Trudeau want to create music that sounds like “creation in progress”? If so, I love what he’s able to do in his mental womb and it comes off as a place that you never want to leave. Life Hard: I Try is something worth listening to from start to finish, a perfect example of not only solid sound organization, but how to do it in long play form. - This Is Book's Music